Finally an update!

I'm still alive, barely. Just joking. Although it certainly has been a stressful last week. We had two consecutive LD stations with just a short one day breather to get all our stuff together for a final go at all the incubation experiments and other sampling.
Everyone thought that this deep deep blue patch of watery desert would be ideal for studying physical, optical and chemical parameters since there didn't seem to be any biological interference whatsoever. Oh how wrong they were.
Initial microscopy counts and fluorescence data from the CTD suggested that we had loads of UCYN at 60 m of depth and a deep chlorophyll max at ca 140 m of depth. Chlorophyll is the pigment that help the phytoplankton photosynthesize.
Some scientists onboard was of course super excited about this when we later confirmed a UCYNB bloom at 60 m of depth (us included).
So in the end, when looking closer below the surface, this desert-like water mass harbored more microbial activity (in terms of UCYN) than we had ever encountered before on the cruise. Who would have thought?

The reason why I have been slow on posting any updates on the blog is simple. We are nearing the end of the cruise and there's lot and lots of reports, presentations and protocols that needs to be written or files that needs to be filled out with data and whatnot.
I've been super busy and after a day of trying to piece everything together in front of my computer, the last thing I want to do is write another wall of text. Sorry.

Anyway, today was the 14th (out of 15) SD, which means that my last day of science will be tomorrow. After that there will be a lot of packing and organising to be done, to make sure that everything, our precious samples included, get back to Stockholm in one piece.

Now I have to finish an abstract for a conference in August. Deadline is the 1st of April. I might have a more detailed update for you in a couple of days.

Stressful plans

Did I ever mention that we often have change of plans on board? I have a strong feeling I did, more than once. So this post might not come as a surprise. Almost immediately after my last post on the subject of downtime I was reached by the news that we would have an improvised short duration station (SD) 14 at midnight, only using a single CTD cast for everyone interested. Imagine the craze following when 20 scientists more or less battled for their tight water budgets from the CTD rosette.

The purpose of this extremely short SD, where we litteraly just stopped 45 minutes to lower the CTD and get it back up again before setting out for Niue, was to get a picture of the water column in a suggested ultra-oligotrophic area just outside of the large phytoplankton bloom. This site could, depending on the results of the quick survey, become our next and final long duration station (LD).

Extremely local rain cloud on the shores of the small island nation of Niue.

Naturally, when such decisions are to be made, me and my colleague were asked to run the qPCR. This made our water demands a lot easier at least. Concerning pros and cons for this site, our data was more or less the only parameter that could tip the scale in favor of coming back after leaving the injured crewmember at Niue. The chief scientist was hoping to find a UCYN bloom for our final LD, since we missed out on a great opportunity south of Fiji due to the massive tropical cyclone.

So we got our water at midnight and ran the qPCR for half the night and in the end it gave us a clear answer: We are not coming back. The filters were almost empty of anything photosynthesising but we did have quite a few UCYN still. Problem was that their abundance was still half of the LD threshold.

Next morning's meeting concluded that we will keep heading east and initiate the final LD within a large cyclonic eddie in the ultra-oligotrophic (dark blue, remember?) open ocean a few days transit from Tahiti.

Now we have another problem. We are running out of time due to numerous delays out of our control. We will not have time for any more SD's and just barely enough time for a full LD. However, there are conflicting information about the time required for transit to Tahiti. The reason for this is that we have also encountered strong easterly winds that slow us down, typical.

I'm wondering if there is anything else that nature and Murphy can throw at us.

Oceanic transit

Today and possibly also tomorrow will be days of downtime. Even though it might seem comfortable having a couple of days off, it is far from it. I quickly get restless after a few hours no matter what I'm doing. There are always work related issues or tasks at hand, but writing or compiling data is only bearable for so long when the ship is rocking back and forth on its way to our next location.

I think I might actually grab a few DNA/RNA samples off the underway water pump once we are outside of the phytoplankton bloom. At least that will keep me occupied for a few hours each day.

Otherwise these kind of days (or any day really) are well suited for some serious gym time. It is a challenge in itself to work out properly when the room you're in is moving erratically in either direction. Since I'm almost exclusively using body-weights, something that I'm far from used to nowadays, I quickly push myself to a state of nausea. I'm not sure that's a good thing, but on the other hand my muscles begs me to stop, and that I know is a good thing.

I never even dreamed of getting any visible results out of this kind of exercise, and in just 6 weeks, but it seems I was wrong. If that is due to my body's inexperience with "low weights - many reps" workout or just the fact that the dietary supplement (Gainer) I bought consists of creatine, I'll never know. Either way I'm happy about it. By the way, I really hate pull-ups, but they sure are effective.

I previously wrote that I was contacted by a regional newspaper back home. So now I finally got my promised few days of fame (hell yeah), the rockstar-scientist-to-be influences one region at a time. Jokes aside (I think that title might already be claimed by Sam Dupont anyway), I'm happy with how the article turned out and hopefully I'll reach out to some and even inspire others.

I had a very enjoyable afternoon and evening in the hammock on front deck yesterday, even acquired a bit of a tan, and as usual when I have a bit of time to myself with an awesome and myseterious view in front of me, my thoughts start spinning. It is not necesarily a bad thing, most of the time I thoroughly enjoy it. Yesterday the result was a poem. I've been writing poetry before, but many years ago, and only in Swedish, but back then I had nowhere to share my writings. Now I do, and that's why it ended up on my blog.

I've been counting down the days until I'm home again. It's a comforting feeling. I also got a few nice photos from my fiancée which warmed in the already 30 degrees celsius climate.

I miss you so much, and soon it's only two short weeks left.

Open Ocean Poetry

Everywhere I see,
the sky touches the sea.

An infinite nothingness,
dreaming of something more,
but nothing less.
Twinkling stars and waves ashore,
beacons of insignificance sharing their lore.

In this vastness I ought to have a place,
somewhere in time and space.
Stars keep twinkling,
waves keep rolling,
feeding something more.

Everywhere I see,
do you still remember me?

The sun rise hidden from view,
life under waves, beyond stars,
starts anew.
A faint whisper for minds so keen,
open your eyes and see what I mean.

Everywhere I see,
you have a place for me.

Last 8 days of science

We are now leaving the large phytoplankton bloom behind, after five days of intense long duration station (LD) sampling. Today the scientists responsible for measuring physical and optical parameters are fully occupied, but again, not so much for us biologists.

Before heading out on the desert-like waters between Niue and Tahiti we have to get into port of the small island nation of Niue to drop off one of the crew who previosuly injured his knee on board. Apparently he has been coping with his injured knee for some time, but now it has reached a point where he is forced to seek medical attention back in France.
I feel genuinely sorry for him. It must be a horrible situation to find yourself in, and also knowing that this sidetrack will cost the cruise at least 24 hours (for the neat cost of some 60 000 SEK/day).

Although we are leaving these chlorophyll rich waters behind, it is not a different picture that meets the eye when looking out over the horizon. The ocean looks just as azure (or blue) as before, effectively masking the secrets we are here to uncover.
I previously mentioned that the satellite imagery of or next target waters is a cold dark blue color, the color of nothing out on the oceans. A watery dessert. This is not the whole picture though as the satellite can only pierce so far into the water column. I'm looking forward to sampling the first depth profile at our next short duration station (SD). Who knows what we will find further down the photic zone (the upper most layer of the ocean where enough light penetrates for photosynthesis to occur).

The cruise is far from over work-wise although only some two weeks out at sea remain, but when it comes to doing science (sampling and lab work) we only have eight more days (three SD and five days of the final LD). We will then have a short transit of a day or so into Papeete harbour, arriving on the 2nd of April. Once back on land there will be an intense period of packing and shipping everything back to Sweden. Hopefully it will be a smooth process.

Curiosity and collaborative work

The first day of the second long duration station (LD) has certainly been an intense one. I've been working more or less non-stop since 03.00 in the morning (except for a couple of hours of sleep after lunch). Now it is already past midnight and I have another sampling in 3 hours. Thankfully I can sleep after that since there is no need for me to do anything more with those samples than either quickly filter them or incubate them on front deck for filtration during the coming day.

This LD has the same schedule as the first one, which means that I have a lot to do. This first day I might also have gotten a tiny bit over-ambitious, but I'm just too curious about the UCYN abundance in a depth profile at this location since it turned out that the science team listened to my recommendations to place the LD within the large bloom of phytoplankton.

So in summary we collected RNA, microscopy and FISH samples (in a depth profile) for archival and DNA samples for my qPCR run. This meant using some 23 bottles followed by a lot of water filtration. An equal amount of cleaning is then required afterwards, which is probably the most tedious part of my lab work. After that was done, I started extracting DNA for the planned qPCR. I wasn't overly keen on running the qPCR straight after extraction since I by this point was very tired. So I stored the extracted samples in the freezer and went to bed for a few hours. But it didn't end there. I also started up the nutrient amendment experiment after my nap. An experiment which is collaborative work together with a French lab. In practice this means that they fill up all the bottles and add the nutrients (which in my case is only 5 bottles - silicate, iron, dissolved organic phosphate, dissolved inorganic phosphate and control - plus 5 untreated time point zero), and then measure the bulk nitrogen uptake for me when we later spike the bottles with 15N2. So what I did today in addition to filtering my own T0's was also taking care of their DNA/RNA bottles for T0. This will be my responsibility for the breakdown of the experiment too. At the end of the cruise I will ship their archived DNA/RNA together with mine back to Stockholm where the collaboration will continue.

There have certainly been a lot of waiting for filtration today, and I'm happy tomorrow will not be as heavy on that as today. I suppose overseeing water filtration is the biologists equivalent to the saying of something being as "boring as watching paint dry". Filtration is just as exciting.

Oh, and when we're on the subject of excitement. I got the address to my American friend (middle in above picture) Kyle Frischkorn's blog. So if you want to have some further reading and another angle of approach to the same cruise, then check it out. It is really good (although I might be biased, haha). He's a Ph.D. candidate like me, but mainly works with questions concerning the filamentous and colonial diazotroph Trichodesmium, which has been fairly abundant so far during the cruise.

http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/tag/south-pacific-marine-ecosystems/

Now I'm almost finished with my qPCR run and eagerly awaiting the results, stay tuned.
In the meantime you can enjoy two more really good pictures from the Ship Games, just to prove that you can have great fun with very little means irrespective of who you are and where you are.

 

Liquid Nitrogen

I decided beforehand that this would be my day off. And oh what a day off it became. High-life at sea. I could just leave it at that, I'm feeling happy and relaxed enough about it, but that wouldn't make much of a blog post worth reading now would it?

So for the sake of you guys, I'll go through some of the simplicities that make up a good day at sea.
First of all, I didn't sleep in. Technically I didn't. I had breakfast (choco-pops) and then went back to bed. Huge difference but no less satisfying.
Since lunch is at the relatively early time of 11.00 I could literally, once more, go straight from bed to another meal.
The reason why I decided for this to be a lazy day is that we are preparing for the next long duration station (LD), which in practice means that there's only time and space for the measurements of physical parameters. In addition, hosting the ship games the other day was rather exhausting for me, so I'm recharging my batteries to go all in next LD (03.00 sampling, hell yeah!).
Even though it might sound like I had nothing to do, there's always something to do, which is a good thing because it keeps me occupied. The best part of it though is that any work needed to be done was for me to do whenever I felt like it. No scheduled times for sampling and no results that needed to be reported at a set time. Just calmness.

So writing, reading, cleaning up the lab after yesterday and helping Kyle and Andy refill their liquid nitrogen dewars just turned into a nice pass of time. It is also always extremely cool to be working with liquid nitrogen. Funny, eh?
After digesting my lunch while listening to some music, sleeping another hour and watching the gentle swell roll by, as if the ocean was a living, moving organism, I hit the gym. Somewhat reluctantly after just waking up.
It turned out to be a good session though, and in the end I'm happy I forced myself to go.
Apparently I wasn't the only one having a laugh today. Some people in the crew told some scientists in the labs that they had spotted dolphins. As predicted when conveying such news everyone ran to the railing by the CTD to catch a glimpse of the dolphins. Little did they know that it was all just a ruse and another crewman poured a large volume of water on their heads from up above.

I also made a phone call back home after finally receiving my phone card. It was supposed to be a bit of a surprise for my fiancée, and I think it was. Just hearing her voice and the kids was great and even though it felt like we didn't talk about anything in particular, 15 minutes quickly passed. In the end I felt a bit emotional about it, and made me miss her more, but again, just hearing her voice made it worth it.

In the evening I had a beer out on front deck together with Kyle and Andy. It's absolutely pitch black outside without the moon, and barely any stars could penetrate the clouds. However, it was of no concern as soon as our eyes had adjusted, and by pure chance Andy glimpsed over the railing and down at the swell cause by the moving ship. With every swell the water exploded with green light, like golf ball size orbs of bioluminescence littering the disturbed water. It was almost like watching a show of fireworks exploding, some smaller and some larger than the others. This phenomenon is caused by small plankton called dinoflagellates, but there must have been dense aggregates of them to emit that much light!

The only thing missing was for today to be croissant day, but hey, that's tomorrow!